The White City

by Simon Morden

  Tempting, but no. She shuffled around to confront the pirate band. Dagger in one hand, maps in the other, she held her arms out either side.

  ‘Anyone starts to cross, I jump. Got it?’

  The captain lowered his loaded arbalest, the pointed bolt now aimed at the surging river far below her feet rather than at her heart. The whole crowd of pirates was gathering behind him. Some found themselves on the brink of the gorge, and pushed back, even as others were pressing forward to see what was happening. The captain leaned forward and looked askance at the drop, and the narrowness of the stepping stones.

  ‘We appear to be at somewhat of an impasse.’

  ‘If I knew what one was, okay. That.’

  The captain leaned into the man next to him and muttered a brief instruction. The man disappeared into the crowd behind, to be replaced by Dalip.

  ‘Mary. What are you doing?’

  ‘I am trying,’ she said, ‘to do my best.’

  ‘You could come back over here and we could try together.’

  ‘Right now, standing on this stupidly thin piece of rock is the best I can do. Also, you’re surrounded.’

  They were not quite surrounded, but it sounded dramatic. The figures in robes lurked at the back, their servants in front. The men had swords and clubs. They stood between the road and the river, blocking it and sending the pirate chosen for special duties by his captain back towards his own group.

  ‘Mary,’ said Dalip, ‘please be reasonable …’

  ‘I am being fucking reasonable. These maps don’t belong to you, and they don’t belong to them either. None of you made the fucking things – everybody who drew one, except me, was killed by the geomancers to protect their precious knowledge. I’m the only person here who can say any part of this is theirs. So, on behalf of all those poor fuckers who can’t speak because they’re dead, I claim the right to say what happens to them.’

  ‘Brave words, madam,’ said the captain, ‘possibly even true ones. However, I find that possession is nine-tenths of the law: once your property becomes mine, your rights over said chattel become moot.’

  ‘And if that means what I think it means, come and get it. Dare you.’

  ‘Very well. Never let it be said that I abrogated my responsibilities.’ He passed the crossbow to the nearest sailor, and drew his cutlass.

  ‘If you take one step I’ll throw myself in the river, and the maps are coming with me.’

  ‘I’m going to call your bluff. I think you’d rather I had them than lose them to the water. Did the dead labour in vain? We shall see.’

  He started to size up his first jump when Dalip put his arm across the captain’s chest.

  ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Captain’s privilege, Singh. Mine the risk, mine the reward.’

  ‘She’ll jump.’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘I bloody will.’

  ‘Stand back, Singh. I believe I have the advantage here.’

  But before he could leap to the first stepping stone, a murmuring from behind him distracted him. Exasperated, he turned, and found himself face to mask with a red-robed figure.

  ‘You will not risk the maps.’

  The captain lazily raised his sword, contemplated the edge, and pressed the point into the angle between carefully sculpted jaw and cloth-wrapped neck. The figure raised its head slightly to accommodate the intrusion, but made no attempt to back away.

  ‘You will not risk the maps,’ it repeated. ‘We can fight, or we can talk.’

  ‘Fight,’ said a pirate, and other voices immediately agreed.

  ‘Aye, we came to fight, not parley.’

  ‘Loot their houses, and head for the sea.’

  ‘Fight them. Ain’t so many that we can’t take ’em.’

  ‘So say my crew,’ said the captain. He added a little more pressure. The point grated against something hard. ‘You do bleed, don’t you? Are you men or monsters beneath your disguises?’

  ‘We are monsters far worse than anything Down can imagine.’

  Mary seriously considered running away. No one was looking at her. It wasn’t as if the Lords and Ladies of the White City would let the pirates chase after her: neither were the pirates going to stand back and allow the robed figures to pass. This was what she wanted. This was why she’d lied. She, and only she, should determine the fate of the maps. Not these robed clowns. Nor this motley crew. She looked up at the cliff and judged her next jump.

  There would be a bloodbath, though, and the survivors would hunt her down to her dying day. Worse still, Dalip would be in the middle of it all, and if he survived, he’d turn against her. That … would be difficult. She wanted a friend. She wanted him as a friend.

  She had the power to decide, one way or the other. She gritted her teeth and turned back around.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you people? Seriously, just talk to each other. We might even learn something useful. You in the robe? What makes the maps so important?’

  The figure slowly reached up and curled a hand around the cutlass blade. Their grip was such that the sword sank into the narrow bridge of flesh between fingers and thumb, and pink liquid started to run towards the hilt. The captain tried to resist, but the point inexorably moved away from the figure’s exposed throat.

  With one last little shove, the captain staggered back, red-faced, and was caught by Dalip before he pitched over the edge of the ravine.

  ‘The maps represent our work. Sooner or later, we knew they would all come to us. We had expected them one by one, or a few at a time. Not, as has apparently happened, all at once.’

  ‘So … what? The geomancers are working for you?’

  ‘As a tree works for a gardener. The tree neither knows nor cares about the fate of its fruit, whether it is eaten by birds, falls to the ground to rot, or is harvested by the owner. So are those you call geomancers to us. They bear the fruit. We harvest it.’ The robed figure turned to address her directly. ‘That is our harvest. It belongs to us.’

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘you know what bastards they all are.’

  ‘We planted the seeds in the minds of the first geomancers: do this and you will control Down, we said. They went forth and the seed grew until it became a tree, a tree that would multiply and cover the face of Down. Now, the harvest is gathered in. You hold it in your hand.’

  She felt sick. She swallowed against the bile rising in her throat.

  ‘So what do you want them for?’

  ‘You would not understand.’

  ‘Are you calling me stupid?’

  The figure’s impassive white mask tilted with its head. ‘Let me rephrase. You may have some degree of agency, but you are not in full command of the facts. This leads you to behave in a sub-optimal way.’

  ‘You’re still calling me stupid, right?’

  ‘If you understood, you would hand the maps to me without hesitation. You would know you had no alternative.’

  There was now a little semicircular space around the figure. The pirates had backed off slightly, wary of this strange creature which ignored gaping wounds in its hand and was far stronger than any normal man. Dalip stepped into that gap and walked slowly around it.

  ‘Why don’t you make us understand, then? Go on. They say out there, that if we get enough maps together, we can control the portals, and maybe go back home. Is that right?’

  ‘The truth is beyond your comprehension. Any of you. I cannot explain it simply enough, and your minds are too weak to grasp the complexity of the answer.’

  ‘Try. Or is your own understanding flawed? Do you really know what’s going on, or has Down changed the rules for you?’

  ‘You ignorant savage. You dare argue with me?’

  ‘You’re the reason Down’s been corrupted. You created the geomancers. You’re the reason I
had to fight for my life in a pit. So yes, I dare. I dare a whole lot more than just argue. Your influence – your contamination – over Down has to end.’ He raised his machete, ready to strike.

  ‘Dalip, don’t. Don’t take it on. Swords won’t hurt it.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He carried on circling the figure, and the figure kept turning to face him.

  ‘They gave me this dagger to make me feel safer. Work it out.’

  The white mask fixed Mary with its impenetrable stare.

  ‘Enough. Give me the maps and you may go.’

  With a tremendous and sudden charge, Dalip rammed the figure from behind. It almost wasn’t enough, and it was almost too much. It spent what seemed like an age tipped over too far for recovery and yet still not falling. Dalip was dragged back at the last moment by the captain or he would have preceded the fluttering robes into the white-flecked river below.

  Mary watched it fall, all the way down, until it splashed down and the water covered it. She thought it would emerge a moment later, spluttering and coughing, but that time stretched and eventually snapped. It wasn’t going to resurface.

  ‘Fuck, Dalip. What have you done?’

  The servants of the White City took a belated step forward, and the pirates formed a line to face them. Neither side was certain of what to do next.

  ‘They’ll never tell us what we need to know now.’

  ‘They never were. Because if we knew, we’d stop them.’

  She was running out of steam. ‘Stop them from doing what?’

  ‘I don’t know! But given the way they’re going about it, I don’t think I’m going to like the result, and neither are you. We simply don’t count in whatever it is that they have planned. We’re never going to make them care – you heard it – so we have to work this out by ourselves, for ourselves. This is where it happens, though,’ said Dalip. ‘Nowhere else. This is where it gets done.’

  Mary looked at where she was, balanced on a pillar of rock high above a fast-flowing river, both hands full.

  Simeon peered down into the river, where there was still no sign of the robed figure. ‘I may have been hasty, good lady. You have my word, as a captain, that if you were to return to us, the maps will remain your property, to do with as you see fit. All I ask in return is no more lies. It seems they are altogether more dangerous and more deadly here than in the rest of Down.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and nodded. ‘You are a pirate captain, though, right?’

  ‘As I informed young Singh here, we’re the good kind of pirates. My word is my bond. Besides,’ he added, ‘I think you’ll find throwing your lot in with us is slightly more appealing, now we know they’re not human. Remain where you are, while we chase them off the streets again. We’ll consider our options after that. Singh? See that no one gets past you.’

  He retrieved his hat, set it on his head, and moved through the pirates until he was at the front. He kept walking, and they followed with a shout. The crew met the servants with the ringing of metal and the cracking of skulls. And still the Lords of the White City declined to act, even as they saw their men get cut down, one by one, by the far more accomplished pirates.

  ‘Dalip? Dalip, what are they? You know, don’t you?’

  He was watching the second rout of the White City that day, but he dragged his attention back to Mary.

  ‘I think – and it’s only a guess, but I’m reasonably sure – that they’re from the future.’

  ‘Our future?’

  ‘A long time in our future. They look at us and they see savages.’ He snorted.

  ‘You killed one of them.’

  ‘I don’t think they die that easily.’ He shook his head. ‘Not savages. I don’t know: bees. We do all the work, we live and we scavenge and we die, then they take all the honey.’

  She sighed, and let her arms fall by her side. ‘That … didn’t go as I expected.’

  ‘I think we just have to get used to the surprises.’

  22

  Did he regret it? Had he given in to anger, and hate? Or had he been trying to dispense some small measure of justice in a world caught up in an age of darkness? Did his motives even matter, when the end result was one less monster?

  Any doubt he’d had that the robed figure wasn’t human had been dispelled the instant he’d charged it. He’d hit it with everything he had, and it had been like striking a brick wall. If it hadn’t been so close to the edge, it would never have fallen. He alone wasn’t surprised that it hadn’t come up again. It might have had the form of a man, but what lay beneath the cloth and skin was far removed from flesh and blood.

  He held out his hand and reached out over the chasm towards Mary. She sheathed her dagger, and jumped deftly from pillar to pillar, catching his fingers over the final gap and landing safely on the bank.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  He looked around. The fight had moved on, up the road, where the tail end of the servants, those who were bravest and had fought longest, were finally scattering, running from locked door to locked door and finding no safety. They’d been abandoned by their masters and mistresses, and the pirates were in no mood for clemency. There were bodies lying on the hard-packed dirt, and between the plants in the fields. The bloodstains looked like evening shadows in the noonday light.

  ‘We do what we came here to do. Try to put all the maps together.’ Dalip wanted to get away from the scene of carnage, and eyed up the pale walls of the structure closest to the river. ‘What’s in this building here?’

  ‘It’s – it’s the only place apart from the stone hut thing I’ve been in. It’s a big house, square, open yard in the middle of it.’

  ‘Anyone live there?’

  ‘I don’t know if anybody lives anywhere, as such. It was where I was told to go, and someone gave me the third degree in there. I thought she was like us, right up until she peeled her face off halfway through our chat and thought I’d be cool with it. It’s not a mansion, just a lot of empty rooms.’

  ‘I could really do with knowing where Crows has gone. I don’t trust him when I can’t see him.’ Dalip steered Mary towards the building, and stood outside, staring up at the narrow windows. He wouldn’t be able to get through them, but if there was a courtyard he could climb over the roof and drop down inside. The stones in the wall were tightly packed, but there were gaps between them.

  On the off chance, and just so he could say he’d tried, he nudged the door with his foot. It moved a fraction. He pushed it harder, and it swung inwards, banging against the jamb. Inside it was gloomy and bare, a corridor with rough limed walls, and doors all the way down.

  ‘Why don’t we wait for backup,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in getting ambushed.’

  She seemed to accept that and sat with her back to the wall. The big canvas bag she carried went seamlessly on to her lap.

  ‘The maps are in there, aren’t they?’

  ‘One lie at a time is enough for me.’ She opened the top of the bag and hauled out a brass tin. ‘This came with the boat. Our boat. What should have been our boat.’

  He took it from her and turned it over, before propping his machete up and easing the lid off. It looked like a compass, but with only one direction – west – marked on it. The disc swung aimlessly about, then slowly settled down. He checked the position of the sun, which was past midday and behind one cliff, but illuminating the upper scree slopes and the wall of rock on the other. That was west, and that was where the W pointed.

  ‘It didn’t work when I used it,’ she said.

  ‘Seems to be working now.’ He bent down to show her.

  ‘When I say “didn’t work” I mean the direction was wrong, but it led me here anyway.’

  ‘That’s definitely west, over there.’ He walked a little way away, sighted down the cardinal, then walked back and did it again. He frowne
d. ‘Simeon would hang me from the yardarm if anything happened to you, or the maps.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘If that’s okay.’

  Dalip slid his machete through the hole in his waistband, and carried the compass over the field boundary. The needle swung about, and pointed in a subtly different direction than before. He watched it carefully as he walked, aware of Mary stalking behind him, trying to see what he was seeing.

  He wasn’t mistaken. The disc was gradually turning, tracking not some distant pole, but something very close by. When he judged that the W was no longer pointing west, but mostly north, he stopped and sighted along it again.

  ‘That dome: what is that?’

  ‘I know it hasn’t got a door.’ She looked at her feet. ‘I tried to hide from you in there.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘It was stupid.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ He squinted at the brass tin, but there was no writing on it. The only clue was the single letter on the compass card. ‘You found this on the boat?’

  ‘It was in a locker. There was sailcloth and needles and thread, enough to repair stuff if it went wrong. Down’s generous like that. You could have sailed it just great.’

  ‘W is for White City, not west. That building is where this compass points: no matter where you are on Down, you can always find your way here. It’s like a homing beacon.’

  ‘No shit. How does it do that without magic?’

  ‘Because,’ he started, but he didn’t know how to finish. How could a boat that had grown out of a sand dune hold a compass that still worked as surely as a satnav inside a magicless area? ‘I don’t know. Maybe there’s something really magnetic in there.’

  Even as he said it, he didn’t believe it. If it was that magnetic, every piece of iron for a mile around would be stuck to the building. There was something else at work. Something he thought he ought to be able to explain, but couldn’t.

  ‘Whatever is in there, it’s so important to Down you need to be able to find it half a world away. So at some point, we need to get in there and find out what it is.’ He put the lid back on the device, and handed it to Mary. ‘It’s yours. You should keep it. I … Bell’s machines: did Down make those too?’